Here’s a few favorite moments that I haven’t seen much of on the cable news highlight reels:

Alien Ant Farm

How deep was Michael in the American psyche? This cover of “Smooth Criminal” tweaked the song’s R&B essence with crunching guitar notes. The scene in the video could have been a suburb in Anywhere, U.S.A.

Michael Jackson is pop king of sick ****ing country. It is obvious—a black man make the skin white and the hair straight, and you know why?You sick ****ing country make the black man hate hisself—just like the Arab and the children that you bomb over here.

In the end, Michael was a sad guy whose talent gave him everything except what he wanted most—to love Michael. I never really paid close attention to the words to “Ben” before, but now it seems to me that the boy pop king—called on at age nine to put voice to emotions that adults couldn’t express themselves—was singing a love song to himself:

I'm going to do my best to remember Michael as the soulful kid and not the tortured man—but in the end, they were the same person.

—David Swerdlick

David Swerdlick is an associate editor at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.